Within the battle between two “agentic” coding instruments — Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex CLI — the latter seems to be fostering extra developer goodwill than the previous. That’s not less than partly as a result of Anthropic has issued takedown notices to a developer making an attempt to reverse-engineer Claude Code, which is underneath a extra restrictive utilization license than Codex CLI.
Claude Code and Codex CLI are dueling instruments that accomplish a lot of the identical factor: permit builders to faucet into the facility of AI fashions operating within the cloud to finish varied coding duties. Anthropic and OpenAI launched them inside months of one another — every firm racing to seize beneficial developer mindshare.
The supply code for Codex CLI is accessible underneath an Apache 2.0 license that enables for distribution and business use. That’s in distinction to Claude Code, which is tied to Anthropic’s business license. That limits how it may be modified with out express permission from the corporate.
Anthropic additionally “obfuscated” the supply code for Claude Code. In different phrases, Claude Code’s supply code isn’t available. When a developer de-obfuscated it and launched the supply code on GitHub, Anthropic filed a DMCA complaint — a copyright notification requesting the code’s elimination.
Developers on social media weren’t pleased by the transfer, which they stated in contrast unfavorably with OpenAI’s rollout of Codex CLI. Within the week or so since Codex CLI’s launch, OpenAI has merged dozens of developer strategies into the software’s codebase, together with one which lets Codex CLI tap AI models from rival providers — together with Anthropic.
Anthropic didn’t reply to a request for remark. To be truthful to the lab, Claude Code continues to be in beta (and a bit buggy); it’s potential Anthropic will launch the supply code underneath a permissive license sooner or later. Corporations have many causes for obfuscating code, safety issues being one in all them.
It’s a considerably stunning PR win for OpenAI, which in latest months has shied away from open supply releases in favor of proprietary, locked-down merchandise. It could be emblematic of a broader shift within the lab’s strategy; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this 12 months stated he believed that the corporate has been on the “unsuitable aspect of historical past” in relation to open supply.